WITH the advent of Christian scripture, that which Otto regards as the “lower” form of mysticism – i.e. that involving the metaphysical disquietude of the tremendum – was surpassed by the fire and brimstone of the religious prognosticator.

This change in direction, originated by the Semites, is considered to be a significant milestone on the road to a higher spiritual consciousness. For Otto, it represents a “growth to maturity” in that the allegedly superstitious beliefs of the ancients is overcome. He is more than prepared, however, to concede that the basic potential for religious development was there all along and that the numinous did not suddenly spring into being with the arrival of Judaism and Christianity. In fact it

existed all the time as a natural predisposition or latent capacity. It was aroused and began to develop as soon as the proper incitement came to stimulate it but to the end it was yet the selfsame disposition that had been formerly excited to such primitive and crude manifestations. (pp.73-4)

It is further conceded that one may even draw a contrast between the vernacular of the prophets and the religious mindset of today, the latter often struggling to comprehend the antiquated language of the past, although Otto does not accept that they are divided by the same gulf that exists between the ancients and those of biblical times.

It will be remembered that the Ancient Hebrews were a nomadic people who roamed the northern territories of the Arabian Peninsula with their livestock, travelling through the desert in search of fruit and water. Like other pagan folk of the region, they worshipped stone pillars and the numerous spirits that haunted the night. In association with a more general preoccupation with angels, demons and magic, between the tenth century BCE and the beginning of the Jewish exile in 586 BCE the worship of polytheistic gods among Jews was extremely common and much of this was centred around female deities. The names of these goddesses come down to us from the Hebrew Bible, particularly when Solomon consecrates his new temple to pagan idols and Josiah is later seen to destroy these idolatrous statues in 2 Kings 23:14.

From the ninth century BCE onwards Yahweh became the god of the tribal kingdoms of Israel to the north and Judah to the south, with their Moabite, Ammonite and Edomite neighbours worshipping their own ethnic deities. Each year, Yahweh was symbolically ‘enthroned’ at the main temple in Jerusalem and revered as the all-powerful god of the annual harvest. Over time, however, Yahweh also became connected with the lambing season at Passover, the crop-gathering at Shavuot and the fruit-harvesting at Sukkot. These rural festivals were then fused with crucial moments in Jewish history, meaning that Passover became synonymous with the exodus from Egypt, Shavuot with law-making and Sukkot with time spent in the wilderness.

Prior to the ultimate consolidation of Yahweh’s popularity among the Ancient Jews, the god of Israel had been the Canaanite god, El, husband of Asherah. However, once Yahweh became the divine protector of Israel and Judah he absorbed the attributes and characteristics of most other deities and at Shechem, Shiloh and Jerusalem both he and El were irreversibly melded into a single divinity. By the arrival of the Prophet Elijah in the ninth century BCE, any lingering strands of tolerant monolatristicism had been transformed into fully-fledged monotheism. Yahweh, it must be said, had evolved into a most jealous and intolerant god.

Returning to Otto’s own discussion on the evolution of religion, he cites Swedish theologian Nathan Söderblom to the effect that the latter made the claim that the origins of Yahweh can be found among “animistic ideas”. Otto accepts that Söderblom has a point, stating that it would be

compatible with my own view to hold that where ideas of an animistic character had been framed they could serve as an important link in the ‘chain of stimulation’ by which true numinous consciousness is aroused (namely, in so far as they served to disengage and free the obscure feeling-element of ‘existent being’, latent in it). But what distinguishes Yahweh from El-Shaddai-Elohim is not that the former is an ‘anima’, but (and the distinction may be applied to differentiate all god-types) that, whereas in Yahweh the numinous preponderates over the familiar ‘rational’ character, in Elohim the rational aspect outweighs the numinous. (pp.74-5)

Given what I said above in relation to Yahweh supplanting El and becoming the most popular deity among the Ancient Israelites, it appears that Otto views this process as a necessary triumph of the non-rational over the rational. Not that El was devoid of all numinosity, of course, as it was God in this particular form who had spoken to Moses.

Otto makes particular reference to Isaiah as the prophet who perhaps did more than most to accentuate the presence of the numinous within Semitic religion. The Book of Isaiah is the first among what are commonly known as the Latter Prophets in the Hebrew Bible, although the oldest surviving manuscript of Isaiah – which was discovered among the Dead Sea Scrolls – dates from the period 150-100 BCE. Whilst approximately one-third of The Book of Isaiah is both the work of an anonymous author and a collection of passages, the Proto-Isaiah actually contains the words of the eighth-century BCE prophet himself. Much of the opening thirty-nine chapters are taken up with Isaiah’s opposition to Judah and those nations hostile to the Israelites, as well as a declaration that a “messiah” will appear in Jerusalem and that the city will become the centre for Yahweh’s eventual domination of the entire world, but the section that holds most relevance for students of mysticism is that which alludes to the prophet’s remarkable visions.

What is even more important, from Otto’s perspective, is that it was Isaiah who made the expression “the Holy One” synonymous with the deity. As he explains:

Assuredly in deutero-Isaiah, if in any writer, we have to do with a God whose attributes are clear to conceptual thought: omnipotence, goodness, wisdom, truth; and yet all the time these are attributes of ‘the Holy One’, whose strange name deutero-Isaiah too repeats no less than fifteen times and always in passages where it has a special impressiveness. (p.76)

From that moment on, at least in a canonical regard, God was perceived as the “non-rational essence” which could not be weighed or quantified in accordance with any form of rationality.

Otto also notes that it is wrong to interpret divine outbursts involving “anger” and “emotion” literally, as they should be received in a figurative context lest their super-rational character be diminished. Similarly, it is easy to allow one’s imagination to run away with itself, particularly – as he says – in the excitable language employed in Ezekiel:

Here are to be classed Ezekiel’s dreams and parables and fanciful delineation of God’s being and sovereign state, which are, as it were, an example by anticipation of the later more spurious sort of excitement of the religious impulse to the mysterious, leading (in accordance with analogies already expounded) to the merely strange, the extraordinary, the marvellous, and the fantastic. (p.77)

The Book of Ezekiel is the third among the Latter Prophets and includes six of Ezekiel’s visions, all of which happened during his twenty-two-year Babylonian exile between 593 and 571 BCE. Like Isaiah, Ezekiel spent much of his time criticising Judah and various other nations, although this was always counter-balanced by a more optimistic belief in the eventual salvation of his people and those in exile had a deep nostalgia for their homeland.

In the first of the prophet’s mystical encounters, he saw a whirlwind coming from the north and a huge cloud of fire that contained the likeness of four creatures. Each had four wings and the feet of calves, but their actual features were more complex. This vision has interesting similarities to those of various other theological and philosophical traditions and among them one finds the Paraclesian theory that the earth is comprised of four elements relating to earth, water, fire and air; the four white horses that draw the chariot of the Gnostic deity, Abraxas; the four ‘angel’ constellations of Chaldea; and even the four guardians of the sky in Native American Indian mythology.

Ezekiel also saw what resembled a vast chariot and the image of a Throne of God upon an enormous chariot would become something of a mainstay in Jewish mysticism, but on this occasion the prophet was filled with the power of a divine spirit that commanded the Israelites to form an army against their aggressors. Ezekiel was also presented with a scroll upon which appeared words of great sadness. The chariot-god warns him not only of the certain destruction of Jerusalem, but also the complete obliteration of those nations which have treated the Israelites with hostility. This was a reference to the Ammonites, Moabites, Edomites and Philistines, as well as Egypt and the Phoenician cities of Tyre and Sidon.

The so-called ‘throne vision’ was followed by a ‘temple vision’ in which Ezekiel observes God leaving the building in disgust, alarmed at the worship of idols and neglect of Himself. Elsewhere, the prophet saw images of Israel depicted as a harlot-bride and then a valley of dry bones from which the dead remains of his people would rise again. One of the more famous visions is that of the degenerate cities of Gog and Magog being ruthlessly destroyed, something that is followed by a new era of peace. Before long, a third temple is constructed and thus becomes the site of God’s returning Shekinah, or Divine Presence.

Whilst these visions clearly involve the manifestation of the numinous in a most dramatic and compelling fashion, Otto is less trustful of the manner in which certain forms of religious excitement – non-Christian, presumably – cause the human imagination to err:

When such an operation of the religious consciousness works itself out in accordance with a wrong analogy, the way is prepared for miracle and legend and the whole dreamworld of pseudo-mysticism; and, though these are all truly enough emanations from the genuine religious experience, they are emanations broken by the opaque, dull medium through which they pass, a mere substitute for the genuine thing, and they end in a vulgar rankness of growth that over- spreads the pure feeling of the mysterium as it really is and chokes its direct and forthright emotional expression. (p.77)

When horrific visions involve great monsters or savage beasts, on the other hand, these are to be welcomed as the mysterious “in a gross form”. Although the “natural” aspects of such visions will inevitably arouse suspicion that horrific creatures of this kind symbolise the antithesis of the divine, they are designed to express the incomprehensible power of the “wholly other”.